Around 30,000 Syrians, most of them believed to be Kurds, have
poured into neighboring Iraq since Thursday, according to the UN
refugee agency. Many of the refugees took advantage of the
newly-constructed pontoon bridge over the Tigris River at the
Peshkhabour border point.

“Syrian refugees are still pouring into Iraq's northern
Kurdish region in huge numbers and most of them are women and
children. The reason behind this sudden flow is still not
clear,” Youssef Mahmoud, a spokesman for the UNHCR in Iraq's
Kurdish autonomous region, said on Monday, as quoted by AP.

There are about 200,000 refugees in the Kurdistan Region &
despite our limited capabilities we are doing our best to help
them #KRG#Syria

Earlier, the refugee agency at the Sahela crossing point reported
“a river of people coming towards the border,” calling it
“a major exodus from Syria…unlike anything we have witnessed
entering Iraq previously.”

The UN, along with international aid organizations and Iraqi
Kurdish officials, is aiming to provide the refugees with basic
necessities but the huge influx of people is overwhelming the
efforts.

“The main concern is that so many of [the refugees] are stuck
out in the open at the border or in emergency reception areas
with limited, if any, access to basic services,” Save the
Children’s Emergency Team Leader, Alan Paul, said on Sunday.
“The refugee response in Iraq is already thinly stretched, and
close to half of the refugees are children who have experienced
things no child should. We urgently need to cover their basic
needs - food, water and shelter.”

The large number of people left Syria to escape escalating
tensions between Islamist anti-government rebels and the Kurdish
militia in the northern regions including Efrin, Aleppo, Hassake,
and Qamishly. Al-Nusra Front, which is an off-shoot of an
Iraq-based Al-Qaeda branch, wants to capture Kurdish territories,
making them part of an Islamist state they seek to
establish.

Several thousand refugees have been housed at the Quru Gusik
camp, located some 20km from the Kurdish regional capital of
Erbil. The camp is still under construction.

Others are expected to be transferred to neighboring
Sulaimaniyah Province. Many are being housed with relatives and
in mosques. Although the living conditions are modest, many say
they are better than the brutal violence they would have faced
back in Syria.

I urge the international community to pay attention &
provide assistance to the Syrian refugees who have fled to the
Kurdistan Region #Syria

“We fled because there is war, beheadings and killings, and in
addition to that there is no work,” Fadhel Abdullah, who fled
to Iraq from Qamishly, told AFP. He added that the economic
situation in the region has also deteriorated, while prices on
“everything” have soared.

Ahmed Karim, a refugee who left Syria together with his wife and
three-week-old child, complained that there was a shortage of
food in the market and that “unemployment was spreading.”

The Iraqi Kurdish region has allocated an additional US$20mn to
its budget for the refugees, but will require further help from
the UN and federal government.

“The Kurdistan region has received large numbers of those
refugees but it should be an international and Iraqi
concern,” said Dindar Zebari, deputy chief of the Iraqi
Kurdish foreign affairs department.

When the Syrian government withdrew its forces from many of the
country’s Kurdish-populated areas last year, Kurds were left to
cope with problems on their own.

The largest ethnic minority in Syria, Kurds have tried to avoid
being dragged into the country’s civil war, distancing themselves
from both governmental and opposition forces. But violence has
intensified in the region in recent months, as Al-Qaeda-linked
rebels seek to create an Islamic emirate on Kurdish territory -
along the Turkish and Iraqi border - and take control over the
area.

Earlier in August, militants from the Jabhat al-Nusra Front
allegedly slaughtered 450 civilians, including 120 children, in
the town of Tal Abyad near the Turkish border.

“We have many of those cases where these Nusra Front militants
are killing, and where they really commit very horrible war
crimes,” German journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter told RT. In his view, what it is
going on now with the Kurdish militants is not “the beginning
of a new genocide,” but rather “a struggle for power in
that region.”

He also stated that events on the Syrian battlefield have
“nothing to do” with a civil war.

“This is a very clear proxy war that we see here, and it has
nothing to do with the popular uprising against the Syrian
government. We see that the Syrian battleground is somehow a
hotspot for Jihadists, for criminals, for terrorists from all
over the world who join Islamist fighting groups - who join
especially the Nustra Front in their fight for establishing a
sort of Al-Qaeda state, especially now in North Syria,”
Ochsenreiter added.

Hassan Mohammed Ali, the Kurdistan Democratic Party
representative in Europe, considers the Kurdish conflict to be an
effort to hamper the Syrian peace process.

“[Other] states, especially Turkey, don’t like the situation
in the Kurdish lands, so they are supporting the [Al-]Qaeda
attacks…and Islam state of Iraq and Levant, and helping them to
heat Kurdish regions by artillery attacks. And this comes in time
when we must head to the Geneva conference [to discuss] the
future of Syria and the political position of Kurdish
reconciliation, the Syrian reconciliation [as well]. They want
chaos in the Kurdish area and show that there is no stability in
Syria, and each part of the opposition connected with another
state for the international power has its own interests. So I
think that the solution [for] Syria must begin in the conference
of Geneva. So if we can gain and unite the opposition in Geneva,
we can succeed and save Syria from destruction.”